As for shipments, the company's early figures show 5.3 million smartphones were sold, of the 10.5 million mobile devices in all.

Motorola said that it would be modestly profitable for the quarter, but did not disclose details.

The full earnings report will be available January 26.

Meanwhile, Google is still in the process of acquiring Motorola's mobile unit, which will deepen its own roster of patents while enabling the company to really deliver an Android ecosystem. Google says that it will continue to treat Motorola Mobility as a third-party device maker, and not favor it over Motorola's competitors.

Well, as a Defy user, I think the phones are great, but software support is awful. They're launching products with obsolete versions of Android, then you only get one update (long after official release) if you're lucky and that's it.So my next phone won't be a Motorola.

The caveat is if you get an update, you get it so late, the next Android version is about to hit the market soon, so you're still left with outdated software. Well, not necessarily outdated, but certainly not cutting edge.

Neither Samsung or HTC have official or even leaked builds for ICS on any of their phones (save the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which was purpose built for it).

So no company really does any better by that metric. What you are seeing are custom roms that have been coded from the Android source code. And there are ICS versions for many HTC and Samsung devices out now. But a developer build is a far cry from a "leaked" company build.